Migration 5 - Vision ...

Friday, September 10, 2010. What are our goals for migration? If you are a migrant, someone who has moved into another country, what are your goals with respect to integration? If you have lived in your environment forever, what are your goals with the people moving into your neighborhood?

Let's develop clear goals …

Let us develop clear goals for migration. Migration is a fact today and it will continue to be of importance for all of us. Our world is evolving, travel becomes easier all the time, and it is very important to treat the topic actively and with clear goals in mind.

I think that one clear goal should be that everyone living in a country speaks the language very well. This is a challenge for the migrant, since learning another language might not be easy. But there can be a lot of support in this and when you talk to native speakers on a regular basis, when you put efforts into it, learn vocabulary, read the newspaper every day, watch TV etc. etc., then you can get into the language rather quickly.

Also, I think that talking about customs, organizing exchange about how things are done in some country is very important. I do not think about courses necessarily, though courses might help here as well. More important is personal exchange. When you know people who have grown up here and talk to them on a regular basis, you get to know things much better than just attending a course for some evenings.

Where Jesus points us

Jesus taught us to love our neighbor. This love means quite a lot. It means that we talk to each other. It means that we appreciate one another. It means that we actively support each other. Our neighbors are those living close to us, practically all people in our towns we are in contact with. Migrants are our neighbors. And the native people are our neighbors as well. “Love your neighbor” means all of them.

When we follow Jesus, our world will change. Migration does not need to be the topic of problems, but a topic of possibilities, of new land and new relationships, of new links into foreign countries, since the migrants bring their experiences, their background, their relationships! Migration opens a world of new possibilities to us …! ... more texts